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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #74, 1/24/2007

Manifesto for the Anti-Marriage Revolution

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

I believe in romantic love. Men
and women are set up for it, so it is bound to happen. Sex
itself is a hokey marketing gimmick that can't take you very
far, but if it helps you get started at intimacy, that's
okay. True intimacy, if you can pull it off, can be a
wonderful, life-changing treasure. It beats
isolation by a long shot.

I also see nothing wrong with people bonding for life. It is
part of the human nervous system to latch onto someone else
and not let go. Bonding has its dangers (like
getting attached to someone who isn't healthy for you), but
also great rewards (knowing someone well enough for very
subtle communication). If the person who you are drawn to
sexually turns out to be a lifelong partner, that's great!
However, it should be a natural commitment that evolves on
its own, not an artificial one enforced from the outside.

In spite of all its cultural and emotional symbolism,
marriage boils down to one thing legally: It is an economic
contract to share all future assets and liabilities. Under
the law, it is not a "joining of two hearts"; it is merging of
your money. It is a total surrender of your personal
economic discretion in a single act. What's love got to do
with it?

Everybody has boundaries. No matter how much we may be in
love, there is a certain point where I begin and you end.
After we have fallen into bed together, determining these
boundaries is what makes or breaks a relationship. Most
people, frankly, can't handle the loss of control that comes
with intimacy. They end up taking too much or giving too
much. The equilibrium of the relationship is lost, and it
spirals out of control toward its inevitable explosive
demise. It may take twenty years for the end to finally
come, but usually the problem can be traced to the
beginning, when you gave up certain natural personal
boundaries and didn't have anything to replace them with.

Marriage may seem logical at first. If two people are
already living together, doesn't it make sense for them to
pool their bank accounts? Sure, it is sensible for them to
open one joint bank account to serve the needs of the
home. It doesn't make sense to merge all of their bank
accounts, credit cards, real estate transactions, legal
liabilities, retirement plans, insurance policies, stock
options and parking fines in a single contract, which is
essentially what marriage does. Isn't it better to resolve
each problem on a case-by-case basis?

(You may think that you can retain your "own" bank accounts
and credit cards after marriage, but you will discover at
the time of divorce that this was a fiction. Barring an
explicit agreement otherwise, anything that happens after
marriage is "community property," regardless of whose name
it is in.)

It is only money, right? No, it is more than that. Money is
power and responsibility, even in an intimate and trusting
relationship, and you shouldn't surrender control of it
lightly. We struggle for money. For most of us, that is why
we go to work every day. Money and how we handle it helps
define who we are in the world. If my money automatically
becomes your money, then I may lose something essential and
irreplaceable about my identity.

Living together, or even just dating, naturally requires
negotiations about money. If we go out to dinner, which of
us is going to pay? This can be a very complicated issue. Is
it the man who should pay? Is it the person who has the higher
income? Maybe we should split the bill down the middle or
alternate between you and I. There's no simple, universal
solution; we just have to work it out.

Ideally, people should contribute to a relationship
according to the Communist ideal: "From each according to
his ability; to each according to his need." This sounds
nice in theory, but it tends to break down in practice.
Communism tends to disrupt personal responsibility. For
example, if one person pays for dinner most of the time,
then the relationship runs the risk of falling into an
unhealthy parent-child dynamic where the parent is expected
to solve all problems and the child has no incentive to take
responsibility for their actions.

When you engage in the economic contract of marriage, you
are signing on to a utopian ideal where everyone is going to
share things equally and work just as hard as they did when
they were on their own. In practice, this perfect harmony
doesn't usually last for long. Without clear boundaries,
equality and personal responsibility tend to deteriorate
over time. Instead of an equal sharing of resources, the
burdens sometime to shift more and more to one party while
the other accomplishes less and less. This was the downfall
of many a hippie commune in the 1960s: One or two people
ended up doing all the work, while the others, lacking
direct incentive, began sitting around too much.

The alternative economic system, Capitalism, isn't
necessarily much better, but at least the boundaries are
clear. Each person is responsible for his own production
and consumption, regardless of the problems he is facing.
There is no generosity in a strict Capitalist system. It
doesn't call for sharing, and if you get old or sick, that's your
problem.

When you are in love, you want to give more than that. You
want to share. When your partner gets sick, you want to take
care of them. You are sensitive to their needs, want to look
after them and don't expect direct compensation in return.
That's love!

That doesn't mean, however, that you should entirely surrender the
Capitalist system in a single idealistic act. The substance
of all relationships is negotiation. After you have fallen
in love, that's what you do together every day: you
negotiate. I want one thing; you want another, and we
wrestle things out and come to a workable settlement. This
is the fun of love! That's the joy and communication of it!
Without active, ongoing negotiation and the resulting change
to each of us, a relationship is just repetitive factory
work.

It is foolish to give up all of your economic negotiating
power in a single contract. It is like defecting from
Capitalism to Communism based only on your fantasy of what you
think Communism should be. When you find yourself in a
bleak factory job in Kiev, laboring to support an oppressive
state that takes all you can give and doesn't recognize your
needs, then you'll think twice about your defection.

That's just a metaphor, of course. I'm not saying marriage
ever turns out like that.

Links

Nevada law explicitly states that
the parenting relationship is not dependent on
marriage (NRS 126.031). This is probably
true in other states as well.

Reader Comments

“And when the ecomic contract must be dissolved with negotiations with a no-longer friendly party - the whole concept of HALF of community property is seen in a whole new light!! Aaarrrrgghhhh it's ugly if one has slaved in the factory to see half of the toils of one's labors snatched unceremoniously away! But then that would be cynical now wouldn't it?”
— 1/24/07 (rating=3)

“I disagree with virtually everything you say Glenn, but it's a great read.”
— 1/24/07 (rating=4)

“Wow! This was a great article about marriage.”
—maryjo85 1/17/10 (rating=5)